Dialogues on Mobility, Surveillance, and Resistance
January 26–30, 2026 | Tijuana, Mexico
The re-election of US President Donald Trump in 2024, together with the spread of increasingly restrictive migration control regimes worldwide, reflects the consolidation of a global assemblage through which human mobility is rendered “governable”. Calls to “secure borders” and “dismantle smuggling networks” operate as discourses that normalize a securitized logic under the rubric of “safe, orderly, and regular migration.”
These mechanisms not only manage life and circulation biopolitically: they also reproduce necropolitical hierarchies by determining whose mobility is facilitated and whose is obstructed, criminalized, or rendered disposable. The dominance of security and economy-centered perspectives—particularly within Global North policy and knowledge regimes—underscores the urgency of rethinking migration and mobility through frameworks that unsettle reductive paradigms and open alternative imaginaries of movement, belonging, community, and care.
The goal of the IMI Winter Academy (organized by IMI and supported by the University of Amsterdam’s Decolonial Futures Research Priority Area) is to challenge the logics of migration criminalization and control, and to reimagine mobility and the futures of migration. Recognizing borders as sites of both resistance and possibility, we invite scholars, practitioners, and community organizers working on critical approaches to mobility to join us in the US–Mexico border city of Tijuana, January 26–30, 2026.
Application deadline: September 25th, 2025
Read the call for applications for the complete details.
Submit your application using the online form.